Or is it all about money, power and control, with the corroboration of Obama's sneaky end run around Congress? Read on to get the facts.

If you've watched TV this past week, you've probably seen "the Red Carriage television advertisement" being run over and over and over.

The sound track consists of a pitiful asthmatic infant wheezing and coughing alarmingly enough to jolt any parent into emergency mode. But what you see is only a side view of the red baby buggy in one place after another, never who or what's in it.

The quick images jump from the red baby buggy beside the Washington Monument, to the red baby buggy outside a congressional building, to the red baby buggy in the halls of Congress, and finally the red baby buggy on the Capitol steps, the invisible baby coughing and wheezing and crying all the way.

Last scene: As the American flag waves before the shining Capitol dome, a mommy's voice instructs us, "Congress can't ignore the facts. More pollution means more childhood asthma attacks. Log on to LungUSA.org and tell Washington: Don't weaken the Clean Air Act."

The press release accompanying the ad said the American Lung Association produced it to "thwart congressional attacks on the Clean Air Act." ALA's website says, "We are fighting to ensure EPA has the legal authority and necessary funding to continue to protect public health."

You have to concede that this ad is a masterpiece of lobbying. It made me want to grab that poor baby and rush to the nearest medical help. Too bad it's nothing but cunning propaganda.

This "Crusade against Congress" has nothing to do with childhood asthma. It has everything to do with the Environmental Protection Agency's defiant end-run around Congress to expand the Clean Air Act with unauthorized CO2 regulations that the Senate rejected in 2008 by killing the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill.

That defeat prompted President Obama to tell the nation that if he couldn't impose his climate change agenda legislatively, he'd do it administratively, with regulations and directives.

In response, many in Congress are fed up with the EPA's rogue agency behavior, and have proposed defunding its unauthorized regulations. One congressman has even proposed abolishing the EPA altogether.

So the Red Carriage ad is not about protecting public health. It's about protecting EPA's power. And it's about the American Lung Association acting like EPA's chief lobbyist.

The EPA website also shows the agency paid $20.4 million taxpayer dollars to 61 American Lung Association affiliates. That looks like collusion and conflict of interest to me.

Not that ALA needs the money. The group's Internal Revenue Service Form 990 shows that 2010 revenue was $47.7 million, and only $796,150 of that came from government grants. (Where's that $7.7 million?) ALA's president and chief executive officer, Charles D. Connor, received compensation in excess of $370,000.

These well-off people manipulate our emotions to bolster crumbling confidence in an agency running on ideology rather than fact. It's ironic that the Red Carriage ad's mommy voice tells us that "Congress can't ignore the facts. More pollution means more childhood asthma attacks."

Scientists disagree. Two Australian immunologists, Kendle M. Maslowski and Charles R. Mackay, wrote early this year in the journal Nature Immunology:

"The hygiene hypothesis is now the prevailing explanation for the increase in asthma and atopic disorders in Western countries. It suggests that excess cleanliness in the environment has led to a decrease in the number of infectious stimuli needed for proper development of the immune system."

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Dennis T. Averyhas been quoted in publications ranging from Time and The Washington Post to The Farm Journal. His article, “What's Wrong with Global Warming?” was published in the August 1999 issue of Reader's Digest. With S. Fred Singer, Avery is the coauthor of Unstoppable Global Warming; Every 1500 Years. He travels the world as a speaker, has testified before Congress, and has appeared on most of the nation's major television networks, including a program discussing the bacterial dangers of organic foods on ABC's 20/20. Avery studied agricultural economics at Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin. He holds awards for outstanding performance from three different government agencies and was awarded the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement in 1983. In addition to lending his expertise to CARE as a member of the Energy Counsel, Dennis Avery currently serves as Director, Center for Global Food Issues and is a Senior Fellow for the Hudson Institute is a non-partisan policy research organization dedicated to innovative research and analysis that promotes global security, prosperity, and freedom.

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Robert L. Bradley, Jr. is one of the nation’s leading experts on the history and regulation of energy and related sustainable development issues. He has presented professional testimony on energy issues to the California Energy Commission and United States Senate; his opinion-page editorials on energy policy have appeared in the New York Times and many other newspapers across the country; his energy views have been aired on National Public Radio, Voice of America, CBS Radio Network, and Armed Forces Radio, as well as local programs. Bradley is a multi-published author whose most widely read book is Energy: the Master Resource (with Richard Fulmer). His newest is Capitalism at Work: Business, Government and Energy. He holds a B.A. in economics, a masters in economics from the University of Houston, and a Ph.D. in political economy from International College. Bradley is a member of the International Association for Energy Economics, the American Economics Association, and the American Historical Association. He is CEO and founder of the Institute for Energy Research in Houston; visiting fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London; an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute; and a member of the academic review committee of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.

Paul Driessen’scareer has included staff tenures with the United States Senate, Department of the Interior and an energy trade association. He has spoken and written frequently on energy and environmental policy, global climate change, corporate social responsibility, and on marine life associated with oil platforms off the coasts of California and Louisiana. Driessen received his BA in geology and field ecology from Lawrence University, JD from the University of Denver College of Law, and accreditation in public relations from the Public Relations Society of America. A former member of the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth, he abandoned their cause when he recognized that the environmental movement had become intolerant in its views, inflexible in its demands, unwilling to recognize our tremendous strides in protecting the environment, and insensitive to the needs of billions of people who lack the food, electricity, safe water, healthcare and other basic necessities that we take for granted. Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs.

Michael J. Economidesis among America's leading energy analysts who regularly appears on national TV and radio programs. As a consultant, educator, and PhD petroleum engineer, Economides has done technical and managerial work in more than 70 countries. A professor at the Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston, Economides has written or co-written about 200 articles and peer-reviewed papers and 11 textbooks. Economides is the Editor-in-Chief for the Energy Tribunemagazine. He is also the co-author, with Ron Oligney, of the industry primer, The Color of Oil: The History, the Money and the Politics of the World's Biggest Business, which was published in 2000 and has since been translated into five languages. CARE is honored to include Michael Economides as a member of the Energy Counsel.

Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is a retired nuclear scientist and university chemistry professor. He is the science and energy writer/reporter for the HawaiiReport.com. A resident of Kaneohe, Hawaii, he has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. His interests and activities in the communications of science, energy, and the environment has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. Dr. Fox is listed by the Heartland Institute as a global warming/climate change expert. He is also the Senior Fellow for Science at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. He can be reached via email at mfox@grassrootinstitute.org. Please visit Dr. Mike Fox's blog at http://www.foxreport.org/.

Byron King is the resident energy and natural resource expert at Agora Financial, LLC. A geologist by training, he worked for the former Gulf Oil Company and has followed oil industry developments for over 30 years. Byron’s career path also took him into the U.S. Navy, both active duty and reserve. In the 1990s and 2000s Byron engaged in a vigorous private law practice. For the past five years Byron has been writing about energy and natural resource issues for an international audience. Currently, Byron writes and edits two major publications, Outstanding Investments and Energy and Scarcity Investor. Byron holds degrees from Harvard, the U.S. Naval War College and the University of Pittsburgh.

Tom Tanton is the Principal of T2 & Associates, a firm providing consulting services to the energy and technology industries. Mr. Tanton has over 35 years experience in the energy, economy, and environmental fields.